The adjacent image shows what can happen when weak news subject matter leads to a disjointed report, and a worse promotional link.

The headline plays up how respondents to a new poll say Wal-Mart is the institution that best symbolizes America. The text below, which we newsies call a “teaser,” cites two completely different poll findings, about taxes and Twitter. The thumbnail photo alongside? George Clooney.

Not knowing any better, one might ask: What does Clooney have to do with Wal-Mart? What do either have to do with taxes or Twitter?

The Associated Press story behind this teaser describes results of a poll commissioned by 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair, asking Americans' opinions on a broad swath of trend-spotting subject matter. The poll's lack of focus gets a big chunk of the blame — out of all those questions, what do you focus on first? Then I'd wonder why The AP chose to write a lead paragraph focusing on two unrelated findings, then a headline about something not mentioned for three paragraphs.

Clooney? He's in paragraph 7. So either humans at The AP or machines at Yahoo! picked out his mug to run with this story.

I'm scratching my head. Generally, I find “mood-of-the-nation” polls particularly weak subject matter, since the topics pollsters choose seem geared more to ensure good-for-the-pollster-business pieces like this than any actual understanding of people. But I saw this teaser only because it runs at the moment atop Yahoo!'s “Most Viewed” list.

I can, thus, draw one conclusion about the mood of the nation: we apparently are in the mood to read stories about polls trying to measure our mood.

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It takes a while to move around several years of blog posts and several more of static documents.

I managed to install a bit more of a design on JaySmall.com, notify Google of the changes, get server redirects working to preserve the old Small Initiatives content, get Ka's blog going on its own, and install some Drupal modules that make writing and editing easier.

Perhaps most important, SID made his way here, in a, like, groovy color-halftone form that brings some of my old world (newspapers and print design) to my “now” world (interactive media).

Much more to do, in my own sweet time.

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Early this year Ka and I incorporated Small Initiatives. She was engaged in long-term consulting to modernize an insurance agency, and I had accepted a couple of new clients for Web development work. We wanted the structure and protection of a corporation, and felt we would need it for the long haul.

Since then, we both finished our MBAs, her gig ran its course, and I became deeply involved in comprehensive restructuring in my day job that will occupy mindshare I might otherwise spend on clients. Meanwhile, the ceaseless paperwork and bookkeeping requirements of an S-corporation made the whole thing more stressful than useful.

As such, we happily dissolved Small Initiatives, Inc., effective a few days ago.

Ka and I will finish out work for current consulting clients, but have no plans to seek new long-term ones. We both remain open to speaking/presenting/discussion engagements, just nothing requiring long-term commitments of precious free time.

We will gradually phase out SmallInitiatives.com in favor of separate blog/personal sites at KaSmall.com and JaySmall.com. Hers is further along than mine — less data to migrate — and we'll post here when each site goes officially live. I would be far more concerned about loss of search optimization benefits if we received more than our current sprinkling of traffic.

(Ka, I suspect, looks forward to the day she flies free of restrictions on her ability to post political opinions, which she suffered while our posts were “blended” on the SI site because of my journalism background and employment at a news media company. I never blog on politics, but broken out of the SI shell, she just might.)

We'll also gradually retire the smallinitiatives.com domain from our e-mail addresses. You can already reach her at ka [at] kasmall [dot] com, and me at jay [at] jaysmall [dot] com. And humans know what to do to make those addresses work, right?

The bloggage emerged from meetings happening at the American Press Institute yesterday and today, focused on revenue models for and around content. In those meetings, Itz Publishing and Belden Interactive presented results of their recent industry survey. It included several questions about subscription, micropayment and day-pass models to charge consumers for access to news content. I'm attending, so I heard the whole presentation.

The coverage pushes down, or ignores entirely, the fact that the survey had 118 respondents, unweighted, not a valid representative sample of all American newspapers. Publishers were not always the people responding, and in some cases, representatives of newspaper groups responded in aggregate on behalf of multiple papers.

Further, the question that yielded the 51 percent metric actually had only 68 respondents. It wasn't a question about whether paid content would work. It asked what papers' time frames were for attempting to implement any form of paid content online. 51 percent of respondents had a timetable at all within the next two years. The rest were undecided.

In my view, the better question to focus on would be whether publishers are considering paid content programs at all. All 118 survey respondents answered that one; 58 percent said yes.

In no way, however, should any of the survey results be reported to reflect the whole industry, especially on such a volatile issue as paid access to news. I think even the Itz/Belden folks would agree.

For e-book readers, the price is not right: Eight years ago, I was a product manager for the last generation of e-reader devices. I love this: Amazon still has them listed, and the SKU has old user comments such as this gem: “I really believe that this device, the RCA REB1100, represents the future of reading.” You know what they use REB1100s for now? Newspaper carrier throw lists.

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I sat in stunned amazement last week following a service call with an agency management system sales rep. The call pertained to billing, technical support, and user group experience issues for a recently converted insurance agency.

After outlining the issues, the rep shared his concerns about the inability to empower customers with access to the appropriate departments for support. He added his company had recently contracted with a consulting firm to help improve the service experience. Consultants spent two days following sales reps around to define and recommend a strategy – are you kidding me? Two days? That's it? Let me add this – no one contacted the agency who was a new customer. From my perspective, the efforts points to a revenue-driven strategy, not one focused on a holistic customer experience.

If your company is serious about improving the customer experience, take the following advice:

First and most importantly, respond to customer correspondence same day or no later than 24 hours. At a minimum provide a personal acknowledgment of the correspondence, not an automated thank-you-for-contacting-us message.

Ask your customers, both new and existing, about their experience with the company – and not just in a Survey Monkey format. Face-to-face offers better resolutions to more complex service issues and proves your sincerity or lack of.

Quantify the number of support calls placed, resolved, and open by type, time to resolution, and who resolved the issue. Tracking calls is efficient and smart but if you need a consultant to help you interpret the results your issues are beyond outside help.

Customer training is the most critical component for any new product you offer. Some topics can be packaged but every customer has different levels of learning acumen.

Have a go-to department or group if your company is multi-divisional. Put yourself in the customer's position and direct them to who you would call for problem resolution. By the way, make sure the department responsible for fielding calls is prepared.

If you don't get the deal, ask why, if, and how the sales experience impacted the decision.

Don't be insincere in efforts to hear the customer out. My conversation ended with the rep providing me with his confidential phone number to billing, which by the way, was printed on the customer invoice.

Today's economic conditions demand service differentiation. It isn't a “build it and they will come economy” and the customer isn't ignorant. Most understand service is the true competitive advantage. Failing your customers means you set them up for failure. Last minute fire sales and special deals won’t save a sinking product line of a revenue-driven company. Unless you focus on the customer, your company may find itself as the fire sale of the day.

“He's joking, right? U.S. newspapers, many with a history of profit margins in the 20-30% range for many years, suddenly should be allowed to collude because they've had a rough couple years? That's outrageous. The marketplace and disruptive technologies are forcing newspapers to change or die. So they have to change, reinvent themselves for the digital age. Let’s keep government out of this, unless it's in more useful ways such as supporting the expansion of broadband to all, giving media players large and small a level playing field.”

“It's difficult to think of anything to say to people who think these ways, other than “good luck.” The real world doesn't believe in such limitations. If the newspapers collude and come up with a pricing scheme where the lowest option starts at $10 per month — fine. Just go do it, and then let's see what happens. Because talking about it is getting pretty silly.”

Masnick predicts “smart” news organizations, and/or individuals, would break off from a colluding pack and soak up the traffic it sheds.

As someone who spent most of the last 15 years pulling newspaper companies into the digital age, I do not always agree with people who presume our industry cannot and does not innovate. It can. It does. Newspapers' best digital properties, you gotta admit, are pretty good, pretty competitive. The ranges of size, of best and worst, and of experimentation out there, all run very wide. I doubt the whole industry would move lockstep in any direction, especially toward digital paywalls.

Can't you do both? No, apparently. Every example I see of erecting pay walls so diminishes traffic vs. market potential that advertising becomes, at best, a second revenue stream behind subscription fees. (That may not be true of WSJ.com, but not all WSJ content stays behind the wall.)

Meanwhile, the major search engines might still crawl and index your pay wall site, which you'd think would help. But they'll insist you provide their consumer searchers at least the first page free when they click through. That adds complexity to your technology model while diminishing your subscriber base in exchange for trickles of drive-by traffic.

In cases where Web proprietors start with content behind a pay wall and later decide to set it free, new advertising revenue quickly outpaces the old pay wall revenue because traffic grows that much.

Where are the news pay wall success stories that would inspire confidence in the consumer-supported market?

“The comparison I want to make to my very part-time golf game is to the part-time efforts most firms put into innovation. If you want to be good at golf, you'll get instruction, play frequently and learn the nuances. Similarly, if you want to be good at innovation, you'll get instruction, work with a pro, learn the tools and use them repeatedly and constantly. Innovating occasionally is like golfing periodically. You may get in a few good shots, but you won't be consistently successful.”

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I often say a key goal of any Web site redesign should be to make the next redesign easier. Given the rapid pace of redesign launches among newspaper.com sites in recent weeks, it appears some last-generation design work was aimed toward that goal.

The latest projects launched on the heels of Scripps' (my day job) own redesigns, reported here, here, here and here. We have four more Scripps newspaper.com sites on deck, and will launch all the rest before the end of the year. (Our user experience gurus call this “Project Asphalt” — the sites have a black top, get it? Huhuhuhuhuhhh.)

ChicagoTribune.com: Larger nameplate in the newspaper's style, not a distinct Web logo. Thinking like a marketer, I'm not sure that last part is a good idea. But thinking like a typical newspaper marketer, meaning I would have a budget so small it's only a rumor, maybe a little leverage from the century-old brand can't hurt.

LATimes.com: What's black, white and … uhh, just black and white all over? To me, the ink splotches in the header and footer (sure hope that's what they are; otherwise, better get my laptop display checked) are rather “meta.” They say, “We know our reputation as ink-stained wretches in a well-soiled industry, but we on the Web staff are so cool, so far from all that, we're going to turn it into a deconstructionist, ironic design element.”

Below the headers, those last two redesigns, both Tribune Co. properties, share similar structures, much as our own Asphalt designs do. You could argue that such similarities represent a return to the hated old days of cookie-cutter Web sites from newspaper chains, a la the Knight-Ridder designs of several years back, in which even the site logos were cut from the same font.

I'd even cop to that, to an extent, in the Scripps project. Some design elements (body text, ad positions, links, image display, video controls) should just look and work mostly the same across content sites. Choices of theme colors, graphic “furniture,” and content (naturally) should retain some local distinctions from site to site. Designers can spot the similarities between the Chicago and L.A. sites, or among Scripps' new sites, but people in general just want to get what they came for, do what they came to do, on any site they visit.

Update (10:20 a.m. EDT, 8/13/09): My fearless design leader at Scripps, Herb Himes, just weighed in on the LATimes.com redesign: “Very traditional, but well done. Pages visually better than the Trib, although their title bars do not anchor scan points as well. Navigation improvements from where they were.” The only other thing I would add, regarding all three of the cited redesigns, is I wish they had paid as much attention to article page readability (default text size, column width and line height, especially) as they apparently did to index page layout. A text size changer tool makes a poor substitute for good decisions on the defaults.

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Here is my last project for my last MBA course: a video to share my experiences in the Georgia WebMBA program.

Now that I graduated, in case any of you wonder what it's like working on a master's in a virtual program, while your spouse is attending the same program, and while holding a full-time job and trying to have a family life … well, this clip pretty much says it.